Marcus Clarke’s cigar

Biographies, exhaustively researched, can take years, even decades to write – Jill Roe’s recent life of Miles Franklin is a good example – but few have to wait a century for a publisher. Written in 1906 and sold as a handwritten manuscript to the Mitchell Library in 1926, Cyril (brother of Gerard Manley) Hopkins’s obscure ‘Biographical Notice of the Life & Work of Marcus Clarke’ is published for the first time this month as Cyril Hopkins’s Marcus Clarke (Australian Scholarly Publishing).